Just beyond the crest of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, a mile into last November's ING New York City Marathon, a group of Americans ran in the lead of the men's elite race. Twenty meters back, the African-dominated main field, which included three former New York champions, looked unconcerned by the American charge. Moments later, a Massachusetts native and first-time New York entrant named Nate Jenkins took the lead. In a press trailer near the finish line, the move caught NBC race analyst Tom Feuer by surprise. "Who is that?" Feuer asked. "What's he doing at the front?" Somebody called out Jenkins' name. Feuer didn't recognize it. He looked back to a bank of television monitors showing a live feed of the race. "He's huge," Feuer said. "He's as big as I am."

At 6 feet tall and 160 pounds, Jenkins is a giant among marathon runners. Both James Carney and Josh Rohatinsky, two Americans who took turns at the front in New York, weigh under 130 pounds. Many of the African athletes are even slighter. (Paul Tergat is an inch taller than Jenkins but weighs 30 pounds less.) Alongside Carney and Rohatinsky, Jenkins' torso looked too large and his legs unwieldy; size aside, he runs with a halting and strained gait, quite unlike that of the Africans, who are famously smooth and rhythmic. He is also preternaturally hairy. In a sport where male athletes sometimes shave their legs, Jenkins rarely shaves his face, and hadn't for the marathon. To Feuer and NBC's TV viewers he must have seemed like some mad interloper thrashing his way to the front of the field.

The evening before the race, some 14 hours until gun time, Jenkins sat in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel at 53rd and 7th and spoke about the marathon. The New York Road Runners had brought Jenkins in as an elite athlete. They put him up at the Sheraton, paid him a small appearance fee, and offered to cover a flight from Boston to New York, which he declined because he does not enjoy air travel. It was Jenkins' third marathon but his first time running the five-borough event, and he seemed excited, though not nervous. He talked about the race, and he said he thought a top-5 finish was possible. Later, he joked about seeing Olympic 1500m champion Rashid Ramzi at the Hilton next door. Then he finished off a bowl of complimentary nuts from the hotel bar and went looking for another athlete he knew.

On Sunday morning, as the men's elites rolled past the 5-mile mark in Brooklyn, Jenkins was visited by a lingering hip injury, and he descended into a slow slide backwards through the field. By the time Marilson Gomes dos Santos broke the tape in Central Park, Jenkins was more than 15 minutes in arrears, struggling to maintain his composure and looking every bit the marathon amateur. But he is not a marathon amateur.

On a Thursday morning two weeks before that marathon, I drove to Lowell, Mass., and watched Jenkins run the final workout of his New York prep cycle. He would be doing 15 to 20 miles at 5:00/mile pace on the Lowell track, he told me, with 30 seconds rest between each mile. After he warmed up and stretched briefly, Jenkins changed into a lighter shirt and flats. I have seen him race several times over the years, and he is certainly a big man, but up close his torso appeared almost emaciated, and I doubt that he could lose much weight without jeopardizing his health. After several minutes of drills and strides, he went to work. For over an hour he and I were the only people at the stadium, which sits between a parking lot and a four-lane divided highway.

The workout was a nod to the hip injury that Jenkins has been nursing for a couple of years. During this key pre-marathon test, it was forcing him to stop and stretch after each mile instead of, as he would have preferred, running longer segments at goal marathon pace. The injury bothered him early; after only six intervals he switched to 1,000m repeats. He stopped after 10 of those, short of the 15 to 20 miles of work scheduled. I asked if his hip was bothering him. "No," he said. "I'm just tired."

In a frustrating paradox, the marathon training that has been the backbone of Jenkins' career -- long marathon-pace runs and high mileage, which teach the body to run while stressed and economize energy -- is also the type of training that aggravates the only serious injury that he has had since his years as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The injury is undefined, but Jenkins believes a weak or damaged muscle in his right hip is shedding its workload onto his hamstring, which in turn partially shuts down from overuse. The problem flares up only when he runs at marathon pace, and so the injury has limited his ability to properly complete a marathon training cycle since January 2007.

At the track, Jenkins tried to stay upbeat as he changed shoes again and readied himself for a cool-down jog, but it was clear the workout had not gone as planned. His hamstring went early, and then, when he got it under control, his fitness failed him. After he cooled down I asked what might happen if he didn't have a good day in New York. He was equivocal: The race was a big deal, he said, but because of his hip injury he wouldn't waste time worrying if it was a bust.

Jenkins is from Templeton, a small Central Massachusetts town 50 miles west of Boston. He is the son of a sewer worker and a waitress, and his younger brother, Brennen, served with the Army in Afghanistan. Until March he lived in Lowell, where he went to college and studied for a masters degree in education. He is affable, a natural conversationalist, and often answers questions in story form.

In the New England running community, Jenkins is something of a legend. There is a perception, widely held and plausibly true, that Jenkins trains harder than anybody else in the region and maybe in the country. In 2006 and 2007, his race performances began to catch up with the work he was doing in training, but he remains most famous for the weekly running blog he posts online. (Today it's located here at runningtimes.com but for years was a staple at the now-defunct site trackshark.com.)

Jenkins records his training and racing in close detail, and the workload he sustains is extraordinary. One entry from 2006 detailed a day in which he did four hard workouts and ran, in total, 39 miles. He has suggested that this day was atypical; it was unusually intense, but nonetheless representative of some of his training ideas. Perhaps because of stories like these, the legend that has grown around Jenkins is double-sided, and for all the Jenkins supporters there are plenty who question his methods. I spoke with one coach recently, a reader of the blog, who expressed genuine concern for Jenkins' mental health.

In November 2007, Jenkins put together an inspired performance at the Olympic marathon trials, running 2:14:56 for seventh in a field that many observers called the finest ever assembled in an Americans-only race. His hamstring gave out around 19 miles, but he limped home well enough to pull away from Rohatinsky, the 2006 NCAA cross country champion, and to pass the 2004 Olympic marathon silver medalist, Meb Keflezighi, over the last half mile. Jenkins' training leading up to the race was only average, but he was characteristically strong over the last several miles -- the section of the marathon that his training philosophy is supposed to target.

Jenkins was one of the last athletes invited to run in the 2008 New York City field, and his appearance fee was almost an order of magnitude lower than what the top athletes were paid. That money, though, was like a gift to Jenkins, who needed cash badly but would have run for nothing. Since finishing graduate school he has been forced to defer his student loans to make rent, and in the summer of 2008 became anemic when an effort to squeeze the most out of his budget found him eating the cheapest high-calorie food he could find, which turned out to be oatmeal covered with sugar.

Templeton teens attend Narragansett Regional High School, which serves Templeton and nearby Phillipston. Narragansett is where Jenkins began running competitively. In seventh grade, he signed up for cross country to get into shape for basketball, and by eighth grade he was hooked. In the mid-1990s the Narragansett cross country team was a regional power, and Jenkins was part of a squad that won Division II state titles in 1995 and 1996, his freshman and sophomore seasons. In the spring of his freshman year, he ran 10:18 for 2 miles during track, which made him one of the top underclassmen in the state. Over the next two years, however, he seemed to stagnate. Jenkins' coach followed an Emil Zatopek-type training plan filled with intense interval sessions and low mileage, a style of coaching that gets young athletes into shape quickly but also often fails to develop them in the long term. After Jenkins' junior year, his 2-mile best had improved only modestly to 10:04 and, by then accustomed to a certain level of success, he was disappointed.

In what has become a major theme of his career, Jenkins was willing to do whatever it took to improve. He was at the limit of his ability to run more intervals, though, so he began experimenting with higher mileage. With spare time during the winter break of his senior year, he ran 70 miles a week. Over a one-week vacation in April he ran 95 miles -- an unusual amount of mileage for a 17-year-old, and, as Jenkins reminded me, he did this during the 1990s when mileage-based programs were unpopular in the U.S. In June, his senior spring, he ran 9:47 for 2 miles and placed fifth at the state divisional meet. It was enough to convert Jenkins into a full-time high mileage runner.

In 1999, Jenkins graduated from Narragansett and was recruited to the University of Massachusetts at Lowell by longtime coach George Davis. By then he was fully enthralled with high mileage, and the summer before his freshman year he ran up to 120 miles a week, 40 above the training schedule Davis had given him. As a freshman that fall he was first man on the Lowell team, but the work quickly broke his body down. He ignored Davis' instructions to rest after cross country, and by January he was injured. It took him years to recover.

Initially, Davis believed that Jenkins would self-regulate his training, but after two years of repeated cycles of injury, recovery, and overtraining, Jenkins eroded any patience Davis had left. "He sort of had this theory," Jenkins says, "that if you just let someone touch the stove they'll figure out it's hot." Jenkins proved to be Davis' exception: The stove never felt quite hot enough. The spring of his junior year, he stopped by Davis' office and got chewed out. "He was like, 'I don't know how stupid you gotta be, but you keep touching the stove and touching the stove, so that's it, I'm outlawing it! Not near the stove!'"

During Jenkins' fourth year at Lowell, Davis decided to retire and brought in a young coach from the U. S. Merchant Marine Academy named Gary Gardner. Gardner, a former star at Keene State College in Keene, N. H., had immediate success with the men's distance team, and rapidly built credibility with Jenkins. At first he maintained the same tight rein on Jenkins' training that Davis had been forced to impose, but as Jenkins became stronger and strung together more and more injury-free months, Gardner began to allow Jenkins more freedom in his training. This time Jenkins' body cooperated, and with several seasons of eligibility remaining, he returned to Lowell for a fifth year as a graduate student in the education program. Healthy and fit, he won a regional title in cross country and helped Lowell to a 10th-place finish at Division II nationals. During the winter indoor season, he ran a series of good 5,000m races and qualified for his first national track championship. Still, his college career was coming to a close just as it was getting started, and he had achieved a fraction of what he imagined he might have five years earlier.
In mid-August of 2008, preparing for New York, Jenkins set out to run a 12-day super-compensation cycle, which he described on his blog as a "festival of hammers." On Day 1, he ran three times: first, a 5-mile morning run; 3 hours later he ran 7.5 miles in 37:24 (5:04/mile pace); in the evening he did a hill workout. Including the miles he ran while warming up and cooling down, it was a 28-mile day. The next 11 days were similar, and in total it was a 325-mile cycle. He also recorded a one-week personal mileage record of 191 miles. When he posted the schedule online, several readers wondered if perhaps Jenkins was training harder than anybody else in the world, an idea that Jenkins strongly resists.

Jenkins does train unusually hard, though, and not many runners have attempted what he is attempting, which is to run a national and, one day, world-class marathon essentially by force of will. It is important to note that late into his career he showed only marginal ability as a runner, that he does not employ a coach, has only casual training partners, and hasn't ever made much money as a runner. In the U. S. there are just a handful of other successful self-coached athletes -- Alan Culpepper, the most prominent, is a two-time Olympian -- but most of those athletes don't train like Jenkins, and for probably sensible reasons. One exception could be Peter Gilmore, a 2:12 marathoner who regularly trains at 160 miles a week. 2008 Olympian Brian Sell has reported consistent weeks in the same range, but he has a coach and team from which to draw support. Others examples are difficult to come by.

After Jenkins finished his eligibility at Lowell in 2004, the reins came off . Between 2004 and 2005, he put together an 18-month stretch in which he averaged 131 miles a week, borrowing workouts from the great New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard, and flirting with ultra high mileage. Jenkins describes this period as "kind of a huge Lydiard base." When I asked him what "huge" meant, he told me he was doing 140 to 170 miles a week "pretty consistently." Racing was going poorly, however. He believed he had a shot at a high finish at the national club cross country championships in December 2005, but bombed and finished 81st. After months of hard training and not much return, he thought seriously about quitting, but decided to finish up the last race on his schedule for the season, a local cross country meet that was offering prize money for a new course record. He ran 29:00 for 6 miles, a minute under the record and much faster than he had expected, and the year took on a different light. It was an insignificant race, but instead of thinking that his hard work had been wasted on a body that just wouldn't run fast, Jenkins realized that he had probably trained incorrectly.

Gardner, who by then was watching Jenkins train but not coaching him, realized how fit Jenkins was and suggested he look for a winter marathon. The qualifying window for the Olympic trials race opened in early 2006, and Gardner urged Jenkins to take a shot and see if the volume he had done could pay off over a longer distance.

After the December cross country race Jenkins began playing with workouts from the Italian coach Renato Canova, who believes, unlike Lydiard, that proper marathon training is fundamentally different from the preparation required for shorter distances. Jenkins launched into a schedule of long marathon-pace workouts and experimented with super-compensation cycles like the one he did in August 2008. In late February 2006, he flew to Texas for the Austin Marathon and ran 2:15:28, inside the trials qualifying time by almost 7 minutes. The race netted him a shoe contract with Saucony, and within weeks it appeared that his work had begun to pay off , even literally. In an important sense, the disaster at club nationals and the cross country race after that turned into essential moments for Jenkins: They convinced him both to move away from Lydiard and toward Canova, and, ultimately, to keep running.

What is perhaps most fascinating about Jenkins is that when he began logging high mileage in high school, he didn't deserve to believe that he could be a great marathon runner. His ability was good but not rare -- at every level, he has been a step (or more) behind the best. In high school, he was just narrowly competitive on the state level but a minute slower over 2 miles than the nation's elite. At his fastest in college, he was a minute slower over 5,000 meters, 2 minutes over 10,000. As a post-collegian, it took years of struggle before his breakthrough. At some point, when he was making decisions about how to spend his days and years, he must have known that he would be at a staggering disadvantage in his chosen profession, and that in all likelihood he would fail. It seems fair to wonder why he runs.

At least, this is how I framed my thoughts about Jenkins as a reader of his training blog. In Malcolm Gladwell's recent book Outliers, Gladwell describes two sorts of genius: that of the young and precocious, and that which is won by force of will and revealed only later in life. Ryan Hall, at 26 the 28th-fastest marathoner in history, ran close to 4 minutes in the mile as a teenager, which Jenkins, now 28, still cannot do. If talent in runners can be understood in the same way that Gladwell understands genius in artists, Jenkins is probably in the second, late-blooming group. If he is, it may then be a mistake to regard him as anything but supremely talented, even if he is not precocious. There is a talent to running 191 miles in a week, or to averaging over 130 a week for 18 months -- perhaps this is a talent of durability. But given the injuries he sustained as a young athlete, even his durability wasn't always a good bet.

"Don't get me wrong," Jenkins told me after the October workout. "I want to win the Boston Marathon. I want to win the New York City Marathon -- more than I can describe right now. But what I need is to find out what I can do." I think his talent is not a physical gift. It is like a kind of unflinching curiosity, a desire to seek out the best in himself no matter the odds. It has driven him in solitude for nearly a decade. In all likelihood it will drive him years longer, and in this sense, any questions of relative success become motivating but inessential -- he is an underdog, so he loses only if he fails himself.

Two weeks after New York, Jenkins announced on his blog that he was looking for a new place to live. He was getting tired of Lowell, he wrote, and was thinking about moving to high altitude. He asked his readers to help him find a new home, and over 40 people from across the U. S. responded. Several offered Jenkins invitations to share an apartment.

I was surprised that Jenkins was considering a move. Before the race, he had all but dismissed the possibility of leaving Lowell, where he felt comfortable and where he was already having plenty of success. That was true, he told me when I asked him about the move, but his living situation, a windowless basement apartment in a house of college students, had become untenable.

He also announced plans to run an indoor track season, where he would take a shot at improving his short-distance PRs and work on his speed. The season was largely a success, and although Jenkins ran poorly at the two national championship races he contested, he lowered his personal bests in the mile, 3,000m and 5,000m. Notably, his fastest 5,000m this winter, 14:04, is comparable to the personal bests of several of the marathoners Jenkins' career most closely resembles -- men like Dick Beardsley and Pete Pfitzinger, national-class marathoners with relatively mediocre short distance PRs and indomitable competitive instincts.

In early March Jenkins drove his '97 Ford Ranger pickup out to Colorado Springs, Colo., and moved in with professional miler Blake Bolden. He began an involved stretching routine in February, and had seen tentative signs of improvement on his hip when we spoke in March. "For the first time in awhile, for the first time since last September," he said, "I've felt like, 'Yeah, there's a chance that this thing will start coming around." It is also his first experience with altitude training, and he now has a huge network of trails on which to run. "There are so many trails in town you feel like you're never going to get to try them all," he told me shortly after the move. "I'm going along and I'm like, 'God, I could go there every day, that's way better than any loop I had before.' It's been really nice in that aspect." He also has a bedroom window.

Back in October, waiting for Jenkins to finish cooling down at Lowell, I asked Gardner if he understood where Jenkins' persistence comes from. Gardner laughed. "No," he said. "Absolutely not."Peter Vigneron writes our weekly racing recap.